Volume of new essays investigating Kleist's influences and sources both literary and philosophical, their role as paradigms, and the ways in which he responded to and often shattered them. Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) was a rebel who upset canonization by employing his predecessors and contemporaries as what Steven Howe calls "inspirational foils." It was precisely a keen awareness of literary and philosophical traditions that allowed Kleist to shatter prevailing paradigms. Though little is known about what specifically Kleist read, the frequent allusions in his enduringly modern oeuvre indicate fruitful dialogues with both canonical and marginal works of European literature, spanning antiquity (The Old Testament, Sophocles), the Early Modern Period (Shakespeare, De Zayas), the late Enlightenment (Wieland, Goethe, Schiller), and the first eleven years of the nineteenth century (Mereau, Brentano, Collin). Kleist's works also evidence encounters with his philosophical precursors and contemporaries, including the ancient Greeks (Aristotle) and representatives of all phases of Enlightenment thought (Montesquieu, Rousseau, Ferguson, Spalding, Fichte, Kant, Hegel), economic theories (Smith, Kraus), and developments in anthropology, sociology, and law. This volume of new essays sheds light on Kleist's relationship to his literary and philosophical influences and on their function as paradigms to which his writings respond.

New essays providing an account of the shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values of Weimar Classicism. In Germany, Weimar Classicism (roughly the period from Goethe's return to Germany from Italy in 1788 to the death of his friend and collaborator Schiller in 1805) is widely regarded as an apogee of literary art. But outside of Germany, Goethe is considered a Romantic, and the notion of Weimar Classicism as a distinct period is viewed with skepticism. This volume of new essays regards the question of literary period as a red herring: Weimar Classicism is best understood as a project that involved the ambitious attempt not only to imagine but also to achieve a new quality of wholeness in human life and culture at a time when fragmentation, division, and alienation appeared to be thenorm. By not succumbing to the myth of Weimar and its literary giants, but being willing to explore the phenomenon as a complex cultural system with a unique signature, this book provides an account of its shaping beliefs, preoccupations, motifs, and values. Contributions from leading German, British, and North American scholars open up multiple interdisciplinary perspectives on the period. Essays on the novel, poetry, drama, and theater are joined by accounts of politics, philosophy, visual culture, women writers, and science. The reader is introduced to the full panoply of cultural life in Weimar, its accomplishments as well as its excesses and follies. Emancipatory and doctrinaire by turns, the project of Weimar Classicism is best approached as a complex whole. Contributors: Dieter Borchmeyer, Charles Grair, Gail Hart, Thomas Saine, Jane Brown, Cyrus Hamlin, Roger Stephenson, Elisabeth Krimmer, Helmut Pfotenhauer, Benjamin Bennett, Astrida Orle Tantillo, W. Daniel Wilson. Simon J. Richter is Associate Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania.

Volume 12 is dedicated to founding editor Thomas P. Saine, and includes essays on Goethe's novels, plays, and poems, the Ilmpark, Bach, Ossian, Goethe reception, and Schiller. The Goethe Yearbook, first published in 1982, is a publication of the Goethe Society of North America and is dedicated to North American Goethe scholarship. It aims above all to encourage and publish original English-language contributions to the understanding of Goethe and other authors of the Goethezeit, while also welcoming contributions from scholars around the world. The book review section seeks likewise to evaluate a wide selection ofrecent publications on the period, and is important for all scholars of 18th-century literature. Volume 12 honors founding editor Thomas P. Saine with contributions from prominent scholars such as Ehrhard Bahr, Benjamin Bennett, Dieter Borchmeyer, Jane Brown, Jill Kowalik, Ruth Kluger, Meredith Lee, John McCarthy, Jeff Sammons, Helmut Schneider, Hans Vaget, and more. The volume includes essays on Goethe's novels, plays, and poems, the Ilmpark, Bach, Ossian, Goethe reception, and Schiller. Simon J. Richter is associate professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. Book review editor Martha B. Helfer is associate professor of German at the University of Utah.

New translations of Schiller's literary prose works, accompanied by fresh critical essays. Friedrich Schiller was a dramatist and poet for the ages, an important aesthetic theorist, and among Germany's first historians. But he left few works of literary prose behind -- seven short tales and fragments, almost all from early in his career -- and although they include some of his most resonant in his own time, they are largely overlooked today. Several of the pieces -- which include The Ghost-Seer, A Magnanimous Act from Most Recent History, TheCriminal of Lost Honor: A True Story, A Curious Example of Female Vengeance, Duke Alba at Breakfast at Castle Rudolstadt, Play of Fate: A Fragment of a True Story, and Haoh-Kioeh-Tschuen -- have never before appeared inEnglish translation. But they are a seminal link in the evolution of the then-nascent German novella. They exhibit the anthropological curiosity and moral confusion that made Schiller's first drama, The Robbers, a sensation, demonstrating an original artistry that justifies consideration of scholars and students today, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of his birth. New translations of the seven works appear here together with introductory critical essays. Contributors: Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, Otto W. Johnston, Gail K. Hart, Dennis F. Mahoney; Translators: Francis Lamport, Ian Codding, Jeffrey L. High, Ellis Dye, Edward T. Larkin, Carrie Ann Collenberg Jeffrey L. High is Associate Professor at California State University Long Beach.

Der Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkrieges wurde von der uberwiegenden Zahl der deutschen Intellektuellen und Schriftsteller emphatisch begrusst - auch von den deutschen Juden, die im Kampf furs Vaterland eine Moeglichkeit sahen, ihren Patriotismus und ihre gelungene Assimilation unter Beweis zu stellen. Diese Ansicht hat lange die Forschung dominiert. Die im vorliegenden Band versammelten Beitrage uberprufen aus interdisziplinarer Sicht diese These und gelangen bei der Lekture und Analyse von Schriften, Briefen, Dichtungen und Dokumenten tonangebender judischer Intellektueller zu einem komplexeren Befund, der zwischen Kriegsbegeisterung und -skepsis, Duldung und Protest oszilliert.

From Goethe to Gide brings together twelve essays on canonical male writers (six French and six German) commissioned from leading specialists in Britain and North America. Working with the tools of feminist criticism, the authors demonstrate how feminist readings of these writers can illuminate far more than attitudes to women. They raise fundamental aesthetic questions regarding, creativity, genre, realism and canonicity and show how feminist criticism can revitalize debate on these much-read writers. These commissioned essays from individual specialists focus on Rousseau, Goethe, Schiller, Hoffmann, Stendhal, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Heine, Fontane, Zola, Kafka, Gide. The collection therefore foregrounds the major authors taught on British university BA courses in French and German who also shaped the dominant aesthetics, philosophy and bourgeois culture of European letters between 1770 and 1936. on these writers Unique in providing a comparative feminist reading of the aesthetics of canonical male works from the literatures of France and Germany, 1770-1936 Provides a major reassessment of some of the literary figures most studied in French and German courses around the world

This study seeks to alter our understanding of Keller's realism by problematizing the act of reading within fiction. The story of reading in Keller's fiction is a self-conscious meditation on the schism between life and its literary representation--and it emphasizes the incapacity of that representation to actually and substantially influence the life it is based on. This has consequences for the didactic writer. The act of reading here generally involves a collision between fiction and its other and a move (or tragic failure to move) toward an acceptance and affirmation of the non-correspondence between life and literature, a process that renders moral didacticism a quixotic project. This position runs counter to the prevailing view of Keller as a consciously didactic author who tried to create a credible copy of reality in order to revise and repair the real world by inspiring readers to make the depicted improvements in their nonfictional universe.